Alleged Montreal mob boss pleads to stay in Canada

Handout

In 2005, Moreno Gallo sits at the table in the backroom with Paolo Renda (facing camera), Nicolo Rizzuto (back to camera, right), Rocco Sollecito (bottom) and Frank Arcadi (left). All men are linked to the influential Rizzuto family.

Moreno Gallo, named as an influential leader within the Mafia of Montreal, is begging the Canadian government not to deport him and instead “extend me a second welcome,” like the one he received when arriving here from Italy at the age of nine.

Despite incriminating photographs and damning police reports, Gallo, 63, says he is not the kind of man the government claims: “For the record, I am not a member of a criminal organization. I have never been a member of a criminal organization. I have no wish or intention to become a member of a criminal organization.”

Impassioned pleas from Gallo come as the government moves to deport him — an idea that fills him with “dread,” he says — because 54 years after moving to Montreal and 35 years after a murder conviction the government realized he was not a Canadian citizen.

“Although it is almost too upsetting to think it, I recognize that my wife and I will be forced to relocate in Italy without parents, children, siblings, any other relatives, or even friends. It is distressing just to contemplate such a calamity,” he says in a lengthy sworn statement filed in court.

Police interest in Gallo revived in 2005 when he was secretly videotaped delivering stacks of cash to the leaders of the Rizzuto crime family in the back room of the mob’s Montreal headquarters. On one visit, Nicolò Rizzuto, patriarch of the family, tucked the money into his sock for safekeeping; on another, Rizzuto and other senior Mafia leaders divided it between them.

Investigators were not shocked to see Gallo in such a milieu. From the day in 1973 when he killed a Montreal drug dealer, he has been linked to the mob.

Gallo was born in Rovito, a village in southern Italian region of Calabria, and came to Canada with his mother and sister on May 6, 1954. His father had been in Montreal for two years preparing for their arrival.

When his family later obtained Canadian citizenship, however, Gallo was somehow left out.

He left school at the age of 14 for a job at the flooring company where his father worked before moving to Kraft Foods, where he worked for 10 years. He married in 1969 and now has three children and four grandchildren.

In making his bid to remain in Canada, Gallo has opened his life to intense scrutiny, filing his and his wife’s financial documents, family records and letters in court.

He takes issue with claims he is a Mafia member and denies that his murder conviction was for a hit on behalf of the Mob.

“My little sister was attending school and had been opportuned by Angelo Facchino, a drug dealer known to police. I was determined to persuade him to stop selling drugs in my sister’s school, and he proved to be equally determined to maintain this activity,” Gallo says in his statement.

On Sept. 1, 1973, he confronted Mr. Facchino in his car.

“I reasoned I could safely approach him as we were all in plain view on a busy street… Mr. Facchino began screaming at me and appeared to me to be reaching for a weapon. I grabbed my .38-calibre revolver in a panic and fired, hitting him three times.” Gallo was quickly arrested.

“It would make no sense for someone carrying out a settling of accounts to head out in his own car, wearing neither mask nor gloves, to perform the act in a busy street before a multitude of witnesses,” Gallo says. “The motive posited by the police is especially improbable as I knew where Angelo Facchino lived and could have launched a safer and more discreet attack at that location had it ever been my plan to kill him.”

He was given a life sentence. While in prison, he received glowing reports from staff. He started a club for inmates serving life sentences, acted as a “peacemaker” between prison gangs and managed the inmate’s softball team, called “The Rabbits.”

In his own words, he is “a mediator, a negotiator, a spokesman willing to stand up for the weak and vulnerable.”

While he was incarcerated, his wife, Ada, opened Motta Bakery, a restaurant in Montreal’s Little Italy popular for its pasta, pizza and pastries, and when he was paroled in 1982, Gallo joined its operation, putting to use the prison’s kitchen training program.

Organized crime links dogged him.

Police say he sat with Vito Rizzuto, the head of the Mafia in Montreal, at a baptism in 1996; was with several mob bosses at a funeral in 1999; and seen in a café in 2000 with Vito Rizzuto and Tony Mucci, a mobster who shot and injured a reporter at Le Devoir newspaper in 1973. A police informant also said Gallo acted as a mediator between the Hells Angels and the Mafia.

Gallo dismissed this as “casual contact” and “ill-advised associations” not involving crime.

On April 4, 2007, the connections became more incriminating when the RCMP gave prison officials a 27-page report on Gallo that came from Project Colisée, the large police operation targeting the Mafia.

Police alleged that criminals referred to him by the nickname “Solid Gold,” presumably after the strip club of the same name he once ran, and that he intervened in several underworld disputes, which he denies, apart from one argument involving a massage parlour in which he helped smooth things out because of his “peacemaker” philosophy, he said.

Officials were also suspicious of the millions of dollars in property owned by his wife. To this, Gallo was indignant: “[It] is in my wife’s name because she acquired it through her own labour and business acumen while I was a guest of the Canadian government.”

Unmoved by his explanations, officials revoked his parole in September 2007, and he remains in prison. It was then that officials realized that, despite him being listed in prison records as a Canadian citizen, he was, in fact, only a permanent resident.

Canada Border Services Agency argued that Gallo was inadmissible to Canada on two counts, serious criminality and because of “his connection to the Italian Mafia.”

Gallo has aggressively challenged the government’s moves in court.

“Immigration is a privilege, not a right, and non-citizens do not have an unqualified right to enter Canada and remain in Canada,” the government argued in court.

This week, Federal Court of Canada Justice Judith A. Snider gave Gallo a reprieve, granting his request for a fresh decision by the government on whether to subject him to an immigration admissibility hearing.

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